Alternate
by Aibari
Summary: There ought to be a warning about these things, Keith thought, like, “Warning: May Include Big Homicidal Maniacs With Excessive Amounts of Spittle.” A version of Eragon that is ever so slightly different.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: ALL PAOLINI'S. Nothing belongs to me, except Keith's name and personality. Two or three sentences lifted from the book.

_Prologue:_

**Shade of Fear**

Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world. Keith thought it smelled a bit like horse, and wished that he hadn't skipped dinner.

"When d'you reckon we'll be done here?" he asked, more to make a point than anything else. Dan, fellow Urgal and best friend for as long as Keith could remember, shrugged.

"Dunno," he said. Dan had always been a fan of single syllable sentences.

"I mean," said Keith, "it's not as if this is doing anything _good_, is it?"

There was a frosty silence. Keith felt the weight of twelve narrowed glares in his general direction, and laughed nervously. A group consisting of eleven armed Urgals and a Shade is not a group you want to be at odds with.

"I mean, this "Protect and Serve" thing is nice, and all, don't get me wrong," said Keith, "but ... er. We've been here all night and I can't feel my feet anymore. I think they might fall off if we don't finish up soon."

This was true. It was also wet, miserable, and too dark for them to even see the weapons they were holding, much less the things they were supposed to be hitting. (That is, if the things they were supposed to be hitting even arrived in the first place.) There was a quiet murmur of almost-agreement among the Urgals. The Shade was not pleased.

"_Silence_," he hissed. There was silence, because you didn't argue with the Shade unless you wanted to die an exceptionally painful death.

The Shade wasn't the sort of guy who'd sell his own grandmother; he was the sort of guy who'd cut her up and use the pieces for creepy magic rituals. It was the piss-in-your-pants sort of creepiness, the kind that was creepy even by Urgal standards. Keith shuddered, and wished that he'd never even _thought _the words "Protect and Serve" in the first place.

The Shade was apparently assessing the situation; he was peering around trees and inspecting the forest trail like a man obsessed, twitching like an insomniac with a caffeine addiction.

"Spread out," he said, with a voice that could have sunk the _Titanic_, "hide behind the trees and bushes. Stop whoever is coming." He then gave them a look of intense loathing, but seeing as this was his customary expression, Keith wasn't sure how seriously he was supposed to take it.

"_Or die_," the Shade added in a malevolent hiss, puffing out his chest in a way he undoubtedly thought was impressive.Keith had to admit that it sort of was. He – along with the rest of the Urgals – shuffled dutifully towards a nearby bush. The actual speech hadn't been nearly as impressive as the pose, though. Keith suspected that the Shade had been reading cheap adventure stories in his spare time – the kind you could get in the capital for half a coin at just about any street corner in Urû'baen.

It wasn't that Keith didn't _get _the whole "motivating the soldiers" deal, because he did. When it came to warfare, or anti-terrorism, or just about anything, really, trying to keep your people from dying was sort of the point. That wasn't the problem. The problem, as far as Keith could see, was the melodrama.

_I mean,_ he thought, _we're up against dangerous terrorists. It's not as if there isn't any risk or nothing. I mean, the way I see it..._

The way Keith saw it, the less death threats, the better.

---

What followed was five hours of boredom and soggy boots and pitch black darkness. Nothing worth mentioning happened at all, really, except that the Urgals got hissed at a lot and Keith was gradually becoming used to the thought of having his toes amputated or magically reconstructed. Keith was sort of okay with it, because he'd had worse during his education. (1)

He wondered what was up with all the hissing, though. It wasn't exactly nice, having a tall guy with ginger hair and eyes like things you might see in a fireplace come up to you and hiss at your face. The Shade sounded like a wildcat when he did it, and there was a lot of spittle involved.

_There ought to be a warning about these things,_ Keith thought, _like, "Warning: May Include Big Homicidal Maniacs With Excessive Amounts of Spittle."_

Then, finally, the Shade's hiss cut through the air like ninja throwing stars with a poison coating.

"Get ready."

_All right_, thought Keith, brightening up a little and getting a better grip on his sword, _shit just got real._

If he hadn't had the brain capacity of an Urgal – and of course this was perfectly understandable, seeing as this was what he _was_ – Keith might have wondered where that had come from. As it was, keeping the sword straight and attempting to focus on the task in front of him took up most of his attention. Possibly this was just as well.

---

Three white horses with riders cantered toward the ambush, their heads held high and proud, their coats rippling in the moonlight like liquid silver. The riders were just as bad as the horses in terms of "high and proud" attitude. This was understandable; they were all elves.

Keith scowled. Bloody elves, he could never stand the bastards.

Two of them looked like carbon copies of each other – both had fair faces and angular features and pointy ears and elegantly slanted eyebrows. Elves were all the same, really. If you cut them up, there was never a whole lot of difference between this one and the next.

Then there was the woman. There wasn't much difference, really, except for the fact that the woman was wearing a dress. And had different genitalia. (2)

Keith held his breath as the three passed him, wondering why they weren't attacking them yet. Then the wind's direction turned, and the woman wrinkled her nose.

And she shrieked, in tones approaching that of a dog whistle, "_fuck!_"

Shit got real.

---

Keith quickly gave up figuring out what the Hell was going on, and decided just to go with the flow and hack and slash at everything that looked even remotely Elvish. So far, he'd fatally injured four trees. Seeing as he couldn't really see where he was aiming his sword, he thought that this was a fairly decent outcome.

"After her!" screamed the Shade through the darkness, "she is the one I want!"

You weren't supposed to mix business with pleasure. Keith wanted to point it out, but didn't, because he liked his head where it was, thank you very much. Instead, he attempted to follow orders. Because he didn't have a clue where the elf had gone, this turned out to be harder than it ought to have been. When he heard a distinctly female voice curse, five minutes later, he realised that he was running in the wrong direction. _Bugger._

Before he even had the chance to slow down, however, the forest exploded like a Molotov cocktail in a flour mill.

_Fuck it_, thought Keith, and kept running.

(1) Which just goes to show; few things are as cruel as school children.

(2) Then again, you never knew when it came to elves.

* * *

_Notes:_ Lawl. This was more fun than it has any right to be. If I went over the top with the similes, then ... er. Sorry about that. Let it also be known that I have a love/hate relationship to all things Inheritance - I love to hate them, or at least despice them a little. Thought I might as well do something productive with all my annoyance and loathing.

Merry Christmas, also. :)


	2. Chapter One

Disclaimer: Don't own it, don't want it. Kthx.

**Oppdagelse**

It was the middle of the night, and Eragon was hunting deer.

He was starting to get really, honestly _sick_ of the things. If he'd had any sense left in him, he knew, he would have headed home two days ago, after the first night. Then again, Eragon had never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, or at least he hadn't been the one with the best self-preservation skills. He also liked to think that he was clever, and that he was destined for something big. (You have to give him some credit – he got the last part right, at least, if not _quite _the way he was thinking.)

Eragon was fifteen. You'd never really pick him out in a crowd, because he looked just like any other male teenager in the area. (Admittedly, this probably has more to do with inbreeding than anything else.) The first thing that came to mind when you looked at him, after finally recognising his existence, was that he looked a bit like he'd almost drowned in a bathtub of mud once and never quite managed to get clean again. He had brown eyes, slightly darker brown hair, and eyebrows like great hairy caterpillars. Considering the rest of Carvahall's rather limited (inbred) selection, this was not bad at all.

Eragon wasn't a hunter. If he'd been one, he would have died from starvation in less than a month. He was a farmer, and a pretty good one, at that; Eragon could do farm work like it was nobody's business.

And yet, here he was. Hunting. In the Spine, of all places.

It had been a stupid idea, really. Eragon knew it, but it wasn't about to make him go back home. Not yet, at least; he _needed _to catch a deer, or Roran was going to let him hear it for weeks. Besides, the thought of losing a bet stung.

Eragon hated losing, but he was starting to hate the deer more. At the moment, he was crouching in some bushes at the edge of the clearing where he'd found them – finally! – trying to aim his bow at one of the animals, fingers numb with the freezing cold and legs aching from the position he was in. He had picked out one of the does at the edge of the herd. It was a sorry-looking animal, really; it looked like a bag of bones with a limp. Eragon rather thought he'd be doing it a favour.

_Right_, he thought, taking a deep breath, _steady _–

The explosion that followed can be described as relatively small, at least compared to an atomic bomb.

---

It took a long time before Eragon's ears stopped ringing, and only then did he dare to move. He had instinctively curled himself into a ball in the relative safety of the bushes, and it was probably sheer luck that he hadn't stabbed himself in the eye with an arrow. Slowly, shakily, he got to his feet, and dared to look around.

The deer were gone. Eragon wasn't really surprised, because to be perfectly honest – if he hadn't spent ten minutes hiding under a bush, face down into the grass, he would have been running too. Slightly to the left of where the deer had been, there was now a huge, smouldering circle of burnt grass. The smell of carbon hung heavily in the air. Eragon stared. It's possible that his jaw might have dropped, as well.

In the middle of the smouldering circle, there was a stone. It was big, blue and shiny, gleaming in the moonlight. If you squinted, you might even imagine that it was pulsing, almost like a living thing. Eragon couldn't remember being this scared by an inanimate object before, and he felt that this was just as well. For a long time, he just stood there, almost expecting the stone to grow into something huge with great big teeth. In the end, however, curiosity won over self-preservation, and he dared to move closer. Gingerly, he walked into the burnt area. Something crunched under his boot, and he shut his eyes tightly, because really, he didn't want to know.

Close up, the stone was only slightly less intimidating. Eragon wasn't about to take any chances, however, at least not in the middle of the night when he was all alone in the Spine. If he died here, no-one would ever know. He poked the stone with an arrow, and backed away.

Nothing happened.

Only one thing to it, then. Eragon picked it up. It was cold and smooth, like a carved block of ice, only less wet. The fact that this was logically impossible – on account of where it was found – didn't cross Eragon's mind; his thoughts were going more along the lines of_this might be my big break_ and _it's bound to be really valuable _and _I wonder how it got here_.

It is also possible that he, in a moment where he was pretty much in tune with people who would come centuries after him, thought vaguely about UFOs.

* * *

_Notes: _I know, I liked writing Keith better, too. And what's with this chapter, anyway? How come it's shorter than the prologue? Paolini moves in mysterious ways, I suppose. Oh, and sooner or later, I'm going to have things start to change. Only they will be small things that will start big things, like the butterfly effect. Or something. Um. Idon'tlikethischapter. It's just so ... blah. Nothing happens! The prose is no good! I shouldn't write at one in the morning! D:

Chapter title is from a language that is like the cousin of the Elvish language ... that's right, it's Norwegian. Mostly because I can't figure out a chapter title that is actually good. Maybe "Eragon Frolicks With Deer At Midnight", only it sounds sort of ridiculous and, well. Ick.

Thanks to **Lady Charity, **your review made my day. :D


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